HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Perhaps it was unfair to expect NASCAR’s Sprint Cup championship to be a spine-tingling affair. Perhaps the unprecedented, year-old battle between Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards raised expectations to an absurd level.

At Homestead-Miami Speedway, Jeff Gordon won the 87th race of his career, and his freshly minted archrival, Clint Bowyer, finished second. Somehow this competition was bereft of drama.

Alluding in part to beating Bowyer without, uh, wrecking him, Gordon said, “I felt terrible about how I went about it and still regret the way I went about it, but, you know what? I can’t take (Phoenix) back.

“What we can do is look forward and race guys as hard and clean as we possibly can, and this is a way to get some positive things going because this year has been real up and down.”

Brad Keselowski’s championship was no surprise. He entered the race with a 20-point edge and took no chances. Jimmie Johnson’s crew botched his shot on pit road and, thanks to a mechanical failure, didn’t even finish second in the points. Bowyer did.

Perhaps the champion’s caution was understandable and even smart, but he had sworn in the days leading up to the race that he would race to win, even allowing as how he was “afraid” to race differently.

“(Johnson) was going to win this race, and I know that,” Keselowski said. “We were not as fast as we wanted to be … but my guys never gave up. We kept working, and at the end we were even capable of getting back up there enough to where it wouldn’t have mattered if he had won, which made me feel a lot better.”

Keselowski , 28, of Rochester Hills, Mich., won the championship by 39 points in spite of finishing 15th in the most important race of his life to date.

Even the Dodge celebration was muted. Dodge hasn’t won a title since 1975, and it was only the fifth ever. But Dodge is leaving the sport for now, so there is little prospect of an encore any time soon.

Owing to Joey Logano’s Saturday misfortune, Keselowski started first but didn’t stay there. His Dodge was five lengths in back of Marcos Ambrose’s Ford by the back straight of the first lap. That edge was short-lived, too, and by lap 40, Kyle Busch was more than three seconds ahead of Carl Edwards, with Keselowski sixth and Johnson ninth.

The race meandered along during its first half, with Busch leading most of the time and the title contenders, Johnson and Keselowski, keeping wary tabs on each other. An imperfect pit stop put Keselowski behind his counterpart, but it was nothing about which to be overly concerned.

Page 2 of 2 - Trevor Bayne’s Ford grazed the wall twice in a span of about 10 laps, but those were just among the many footnotes drawing scant attention.

The first two caution flags were for debris. In fact, it wasn’t until lap 153 that Nationwide Series champ Ricky Stenhouse Jr. actually hit a wall with enough impact to slow the entire field.

Then “poof” went the Chase. First, on lap 213, Johnson’s crew failed him, leaving off a lug nut on the left-rear tire and earning a penalty. A few laps later, Johnson was back on pit road but not to change tires. He coasted down pit road because it was the way to the garage.

It didn’t take “points as they run” to determine that Keselowski was the champion.